Google+ Pages for Business LaunchedFor businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you'll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.[br][br]With Google+, we strive to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. Today's initial launch of Google+ Pages brings us a little bit closer, but we've still got lots of improvements planned, and miles to go before we sleep.

Google Freshness Algo TweakBuilding upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we're making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

Socialbots Scrape Facebook For DataWhat makes a socialbot different is that it is able to pass itself off as a real Facebook user.[br][br]The software takes over control of a social networking profile and from there performs basic activities such as posting messages and sending requests. [br][br]

Are We Seeing Google Vince Update 2.0?Could there be a lot of confusion in attributing ranking success of brands post-Panda with Panda instead of Vince? We talk a lot about different iterations of Panda (1.0 to 2.5), but not about Vince.

Ubuntu Linux To Be Developed For Smartphones, Tablets, And Smart TVsThis is a natural expansion of our idea as Ubuntu as Linux for human beings. As people have moved from desktop to new form factors for computing, it's important for us to reach out to out community on these platforms. So, we'll embrace the challenge of how to use Ubuntu on smartphones, tablets and smart-screens.

New Google AdWords Location TargetingTo provide an even better experience for our advertisers, we've connected the location targeting feature within AdWords to Google Maps. This will allow us to provide more information about locations, make relevant location suggestions, and improve the level of accuracy of our location targeting. We think these changes will make location targeting an even more useful tool for improving your campaign results.[br][br]Today we're announcing the first of these changes: a makeover to the location targeting interface within AdWords. The new Location Targeting Tool will make it easier to discover and obtain more detail on potential target locations.

Baidu Profit Up 80 Percent, Forecasts More GrowthBaidu Inc., which operates China's most popular search engine, said Friday its latest quarterly profit jumped 80 percent as strong growth in usage of its site helped to drive advertising revenue higher.

What To Do With A Great Google SEO TrickI discovered something in one of my zillions of tests I always have running, something huge. Something so huge in fact that after several additional tests has me shaking today.

Firefox Now With BingFirefox with Bing offers the latest version of Firefox with Bing set as your home page and the default setting in the search box and AwesomeBar (where you can also type in queries as well as Web addresses). If you already have the latest version of Firefox, then you just need to download the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on to set the same preferences.

U.S. And U.K. Trial Of Bid Per Call In Google AdWordsOver the next few weeks in the US and UK, we'll be rolling out the ability for advertisers to bid for phone calls, in addition to bidding for clicks, when they show Google search ads on computers and tablets.[br][br]Today, a combination of your ad's Quality Score and max cost-per-click (CPC) bid determine your Ad Rank, which influences your ad's position. But with bid-per-call, your bid for phone calls and phone call Quality Score can directly factor into your Ad Rank, too. Higher ranked ads are more likely to be seen and can therefore generate more phone calls (and clicks, too).

Google Removes + Search Operator, Expands Quotation Marks FunctionalityWe've made the ways you can tell Google exactly what you want more consistent by expanding the functionality of the quotation marks operator. In addition to using this operator to search for an exact phrase, you can now add quotation marks around a single word to tell Google to match that word precisely.

So Long Google And Thanks For All The FishTwo months ago I sold my main business. It was a website that depended 100pct on free Google traffic. We had owned the site since 1995 and after I visited a conference and found out what Google wanted to see to rank well, it started making money in 2001.[br][br]Then came Panda. The time I had feared for over 10 years had finally arrived and Google no longer loved us, they liked us, but the heavy petting of the past was over between us. Our income dived by 45% which was tough to swallow.

So Long Google And Thanks For All The FishTwo months ago I sold my main business. It was a website that depended 100pct on free Google traffic. We had owned the site since 1995 and after I visited a conference and found out what Google wanted to see to rank well, it started making money in 2001.[br][br]Then came Panda. The time I had feared for over 10 years had finally arrived and Google no longer loved us, they liked us, but the heavy petting of the past was over between us. Our income dived by 45pct which was tough to swallow.

Yahoo Microsoft Search Alliance Global Algo Transition CompletesIt is with great pleasure I'd like to share that Yahoo! has completed the algorithmic transition to Bing in all global markets (except Korea), across desktop and mobile, for all Yahoo! and syndication traffic.[br][br]This has been a huge effort spanning 20-plus months involving many people across Yahoo! and Microsoft.[br][br]Only Korea, which involves a three-way integration between Yahoo, Microsoft and Daum, remains, and is expected to complete by the end of the year.